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Harvey Milk, left, shakes hands with presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in this 1976 photo. Today is the 37th anniversary of Milk announcing his candidacy for San Francisco Supervisor. When Milk won the election, he became California’s first openly gay elected official. Photo: Harvey Milk Foundation.

LONG BEACH – Harvey Milk gave Jackie Grover hope.

The 70-year-old Bixby Knolls resident, who used to live in San Francisco, met the social justice organizer in 1976 in his Castro neighborhood camera shop. Decades before a California law protected LGBT employees from discrimination and gay marriage was legal, Milk was advocating equality.

Today is the 37th anniversary of Milk declaring his candidacy for board of supervisors. Milk won that 1977 race and became California’s first openly gay elected official.

These activists are protesting police brutality against gay people at the Black Cat tavern in Silver Lake. The year and identities of the people are unknown. The date might be circa Feb. 1967.

For the gay patrons of the Black Cat tavern in Silver Lake, it was an awful way to start to 1967.

As balloons dropped from the ceiling at midnight to mark the New Year, undercover Los Angeles Police Department cops ripped Christmas decorations from the walls, brandished guns, then beat and cuffed 14 people.

Two men arrested for kissing were later forced to register as sex offenders; one bartender suffered a ruptured spleen.

The Cove Avenue stairway, east of the Silver Lake reservoirs, was recognized as a historic site by the City of Los Angeles and dedicated to the Mattachine Society, the pioneering gay rights group founded by Hays in 1952. It’s now called “The Mattachine Steps.”The stairway is near Hays’ former residence and location for the group’s first secret meeting Nov. 11, 1950.

LOS ANGELES – Curious about the City of Angeles’ gay rights movement history?

For example, it pre-dates New York’s Stonewall Riots in 1968, which many people think is the dawn of the modern gay liberation movement.

Martin Luther King, Jr., left, walks with Bayard Rustin in this 1956 photo. Rustin was King’s mentor and was the architect of King’s 1963 March on Washington. Photo: Associated Press

(This article is part of the Throwback Thursday series on LGBT history. Every week, we will feature an event or person significant to our community’s history. Most of the articles will be about Long Beach or Los Angeles’ contributions, but not all of them. Nevertheless, all of them are worth knowing. This article was first published Nov. 21, 2013. – Out in the 562)

Rustin, who died in 1987 at the age of 75, practiced a life of nonviolent protest and was a mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin, who lived as an openly gay black man when hiding in the closet was the norm, also was the architect of King’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.